


These Vines of Iron, Walls That Form a Prison

by starlight_firelight



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Greek & Roman Mythology - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient History, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied Femslash, a retelling, because Daphne deserves better, not really apollo/daphne, rather lacking in a happy ending though, so many changes in tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-03 20:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19471726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_firelight/pseuds/starlight_firelight
Summary: First, he came down to me. Phoebus Apollo, in all of his fiery grace, descended from Olympus and stood before me. He scanned my body with eyes that struck fear deeper into me than Achilles’ spears could ever hope to. He did not speak at first, only stare.He said something. Motioned towards my head.I could not hear him. My blood pounded in my ears, far too loud to let any sound in.I was afraid. Not for him, though he was flame. Gods of suns and healing probably burn always, I thought.(A brief retelling of Ovid's Apollo and Daphne)





	These Vines of Iron, Walls That Form a Prison

_’Help me, Father!’ She pleaded. ‘If rivers have power_  
_over nature,_  
_mar the beauty which made me admired too well, by_  
_changing_  
_my form!’ She had hardly ended her prayer when a_  
_heavy numbness_  
_came over her body; her soft white bosom was ringed_  
_in a layer_  
_of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into_  
_branches._  
_The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish_  
_roots;_  
_her head was confined in a treetop; and all that remained_  
_was her beauty._

Ovid, _Metamorphoses_ 1.545-51

_

I try to scream at the Gods.

I cannot scream.

_nothing._

A reply and an answer, a void to fill a soul.

Pain and misery, a prison I cannot escape. This is what they have given me.

They have taken more.

They have taken nearly everything, burnt it all save for what little remains.

I am tired. I should not be, this I know. The sea burns in ways it never has before, salt crusting and sealing ever stronger the prison of my own creation. The water will be blue as sapphire, I think. The coast of a sea that had brought me so much joy, that had feed my rivers and cared for my trees.

No longer are these things mine, I think.

I am lucky now to be on a cliff, rather than near the edge of the ocean. The salt would burn too strongly there, I think. _Poison._

I am lucky to be here at all, I think.

I am not.

Rather would I be in a prison under the ground, moving and seeing, hearing and smelling. Things I can no longer do.

I am cursed to sit here for all eternity, I think. A painful statue ever to grace the cliffside.

This is my prison of wood and vine, constructed first as a barricade that now serves as the walls of a cell. If I am the people of Troy, I have long starved and lost resources. 

I have cursed myself, I think

Cursed myself to sit here for the rest of time, to feel Apollo lay to rest each night over the sea. He is setting now, I suppose. Bringing in his chariot and tying up his horses of flame. 

Why ever did I choose west to face? I ought to have turned around before he reached me, I think. 

I cannot hear or see or taste, of course. Not in these walls. Touch is all he left me.

I am no longer really here, I think. I can feel the dying heat of his chariot, the rustle of the wind in my leaves, the restriction of the salt upon my twigs, the run of water beneath my roots, the ghosts of his touch upon my trunk. I can feel nothing more, can access no other sense than that.

I have been robbed, I think. The Gods have robbed me of an eternity along this Thessalian coast that once was mine. My blood was the rivers, my skin was the dirt, my hair the trees. Now, my hair is leaves, my blood mere resin, my skin a craggy prison of bark.

I am trapped here, isolated, tired, and alone.

_

First, He came down to me. Phoebus Apollo, in all of his fiery grace, descended from Olympus and stood before me. He scanned my body with eyes that struck fear deeper into me than Achilles’ spear could ever hope to. He did not speak at first, only stare. 

He said something. Motioned towards my head.

I could not hear him. My blood pounded in my ears, far too loud to let any sound in. 

I was afraid. Not for him, though he was flame. Gods of suns and healing probably burn always, I thought.

I could see it in his eyes, a lustful infatuation that for so long I had stayed away from. Artemis has no power against her brother, does she? Not as he is now, tangible and burning and wanting. No, I thought. There is no one to help me, no Goddess and no God. 

He reached out to touch me, fast and abrupt and blazing.

He could not. Would not, I wished.

Good things never come of humans who fall for Gods. We are not meant to be, them and us. Semelê, turned to dust by Hera’s cruel revenge. Psyche, forced to endure such hardship at the hands of Aphrodite’s envy over her son. Medusa, raped by Poseidon and cursed by Athena. Cyrene, lover to both Apollo and Mars, left behind. Otrera, queen of the Amazons. Orion, murdered by Gaia. Pallas, killed by the ineptitude of Athena and Zeus. Hyacinthus, killed by his lover Apollo.

The list does not end.

Men should not lay with Gods. Nothing good has ever come of it.

I turned and ran. I pounded my feet over the ground that I ruled, nymph of this coast. It was my land, I thought, my land before he set ever-faster pursuing foot upon it.  


I tripped on the hem of my _chiton_ —a foolishly long dress, I think now—and he caught my arm, for a moment. I tore free, leaving in his hand a carefully-crafted wooden button, the product of my own hands. For a moment I feared that he had set me on fire. Suns are blazing, burning, spreading, after all. He did not.

Faster I ran, chest burning and fear choking. 

He began to talk, winded and breathy yet louder than anything. My trees cowered from his flame. Oh, how I wished I could cower also. 

I could do nothing but run.

He offered me anything. He was a God. He could give me food, immortality, a palace, a kingdom to rule. I wanted nothing from him, for I had everything from my Thessaly. Still I ran, still he followed, always closer, always at my heels.

He pleaded, chastised, insulted. He spoke of his own grandeur. 

He said nothing I already do not know.

He is Phoebus Apollo. God of healing, chariot driver of the Sun. he is plague and archery and music. His father is Zeus, and sister Artemis. He could give anything, take anything. He could tell me my future, teach me the past, and show me the present. 

I wanted nothing he had to give.

He had Gods behind him, the wind to lengthen his strides, the ocean to push along his feet, love-lust to motivate him.

I never could have won.

I tired, my lungs no longer able to take in air, my feet raw for the scraping of the harsh sand upon my soles. When I could run no longer, when I could feel his burning breath on my neck and his footfalls fell faster than mine, I stopped.

We had come to the edge of a cliff, the kind of haggard and straight-down face of rock that is found along many a place on my shoreline. The sea had pulled away, lapping at the sand below the rock-face with all the calmness of the Lethe.

I stopped there, focused all of my power on one thing.

Change. 

I could feel him slam into me, surprised by my sudden ceasing. Perhaps he thought I would jump, take my life by splintering my skull on the bitter rocks below. 

How I wish I had.

I did not.

Instead, I transformed. Metamorphosed, I would be safe. I knew this.

My feet sunk into the earth, toes spreading and splitting off, little tributaries of root matter. My breast flattened, legs fused as my skin built into a cocoon of bark about my body. My arms heaved up, coated in bark and solidified into wood. From my fingers tiny branches formed, from those even smaller branches were born. My face stretched toward the sun, barked over and wooden. My hair formed upwards, towards the sun chariot in the sky, and morphed into green and verdant foliage. 

He gripped my waist—trunk, now—startled to see what I had done to escape him. He stepped back. His flames died.

I could not see him or hear him, but I could feel him. He stopped burning quite so harshly. He leaned onto me, shaking as he grasped at my branches for support. I supposed he was crying. 

He must have stopped at some point, for after what felt like ages he stepped away. He returned almost immediately, this time caressing and kissing my skin-turned-bark.

He murmured something, to terrible to be heard, but the vibrations of his lips upon my branches told me this.

Something changed, then. He cursed me, I thought. Perhaps he thought he was blessing me, preserving me. He was not.

Permanence.

I am never going to leave this tree, I thought. I shall be stuck here forever, and once my trees have died and my shore no longer consoles me, I shall still be here, solitary and sad. I shall become a cautionary tale, something told by mothers to daughters for the sole purpose of teaching them to never go near a God. I shall be here once Greece is dust and sand, once the world is gone. I shall be here for eternity, I think. He has cursed me thus, imprisoned me within this cell crafted of the thing I so used to adore. 

I felt him leave me, and then I felt his hands upon the tops of my branches. He pulled at my hair and tore out the leaves that once were the same deep brown as wet wood. 

He left. I could feel him walk away, peaceful and tranquil as if nothing ever happened.

As if he had not doomed me to an eternity of nothingness.

_

I am still here.

The wind bites now, for it is not the same warm breeze that graced my seashore before he arrived. I am nothing in this form, I think. I might as well have just buried myself alive in my sands. Perhaps then I would  
not be so lonely.

My roots have stretched out ever longer in the years since he came. I run beneath most of my seashore, encompassing the only part of Greece I ever got the chance to visit. I sit here on this lonely cliff and feel nothing.

Sometimes, a bird perches on me.

I occupy my days with simple thoughts, concepts that pass across my mind with the swiftness of the sea’s current, the unrelenting tug of the undertow.

I am alone, and I am lonely. 

There is nothing for me anymore, no cry of an eagle, no azure waters waiting for me to dip my toes in. there are no flowers to eat, trees to climb. The sun no longer burns my skin in the way it used to, no longer darkens my already dark complexion. 

_

I was a wood-nymph before he came and cursed me. I ruled a fragment of Thessalian coast, living and breathing amongst the trees and the sand and the rocks. Never had I gone beyond the boundaries of my territory, and never had anybody infringed upon mine.

Wood-nymphs other than myself lived alongside me, inhabiting their own fragments of Thessaly. We spoke across borders sometimes, exchanging news and words of formality. They were empty to me, an interruption in my sunlight and my trees, my cliffs and sand and waves. I saw them as mere breaks in my time, little areas of necessity that had not yet been filled in with more tree-climbing, more swimming and laughter.

The first time I saw a sea-nymph, I did not quite know what to make of her. Never had I seen any Naiads, any Oceanids. I only had spoken to the wood-nymphs, void as cups unfilled.

Sea-nymphs are different from us. 

Wood-nymphs are lean and strong as the trees that surround us, our hair dark and coiled. Our skin is dark as that of the humans in Egypt or Aethiopia, or other far-away lands. Our eyes are green as the foliage and our hands are calloused and tough.

I was swimming in the sea, resting my tired and sand-burnt feet amongst the kelp when I saw her. She had surfaced and was sitting there, her head poking above the water. She looked at me. I looked back.  
Her skin was as pale and translucent as the sky on a calm day, her veins prominent and blue. Her hair was as black as the wings of the crows that sometimes flew overhead. Her lips were pale as her skin, dead-blue and smiling. I did not know what she was. I thought her a Goddess at first, or a Faerie from the snowy north come down to grace my water. No, I thought. She is too at home here. She blended in with the sea seamlessly, like honey poured over honey.

This is her water, I thought. I have no right to be here.

I did not go back into the water, after. It felt rude to infringe upon her, for it was not my water. I had thought it to be, brash and selfish as I was then. I was wrong, so I did not go back.

Sometimes I would sit on the rocks by the sea, where bitter tree-topped cliffs met sand. I would sit there and watch the tide rise and fall as I waited for her to surface, if only to catch another glimpse of her. I could wait for days at a time.

We nymphs are eternal, you see. Or rather, we are as eternal as our surroundings. For as long as my trees persist, so shall I. For as long as the ocean greets my sands, so shall the sea-nymph live on. I could sit and wait and watch for centuries, If I so wished.

Sometimes, she would breach the waves. I never saw much more of her than her head and shoulders, but I could tell that she was tall and slim as I. Sometimes, she would smile and wave. She had little fins between her long stick-thin fingers, and lacerations along her neck through which she breathed.

We were just _there_ , the nymphs and the birds and the trees and I. No human ever disturbed the peaceful Thessalian coast that was our home, so we had no reason to fear them. As of the Gods, Hermes would pass through sometimes, messenger as he is. He would tell us news of the outside, permeated by his wit and his humour. Dionysus would storm about every once in a century, infecting every corner of Greece with his drunken night revels. Once, a nymph left with them, joined his Maenads and never was seen again.

Artemis spoke to me once, as she passed through on a Hunt with her many pledged women behind her. She asked me to join her ranks, since I had long since sworn off of love as Athena and she before me. I did not want to kill, though. I was a wood-nymph, after all, and wood-nymphs do not end lives. So I refused her offer. She was gracious, as a Goddess should be. I had expected her to smite me, cut me down with a silver arrow to my heart or set her dogs upon me. Hot-tempered as she was, she let me be.

Perhaps she will exact revenge against her brother for trapping me, though I am not one of her Huntresses. I hope she does.

I used to plait my hair and wear dresses that ended at the knee, all the better for traversing amongst my trees and roots and brambles, for splashing in my rivers and for dancing on the sand.

Sometimes, I could see the sea-nymph dancing with me. I liked dancing; I would light a fire and dance in the heat of its flames. Never did I fear catching fire, as I do now. She would sway back and forth beneath the turquoise water and smile up at me from her place in the kelp. 

_

I feel her cold, watery hands upon my face one night. Though I never touched her hands, I know it is her. She cups my wooden, overgrown face in her hands, caresses it and then takes her hands away. I yearn to lean towards her, to tell her that I would like her to touch me again, to expose me to the feeling of life that for so long I have been denied.

The last time I was touched by hands, they belonged to Phoebus Apollo. His burned, searing into my bark and scarring me. She is ever so different. Her touch sooths, wipes away salt and sand and cools me from what residual heat he left me.

I wish I could tell her anything. I wish I could watch her play with the fish and the sharks, see her wave her finned hand at me in greeting one more time.

I cannot.

I wonder if she is still there. I know she is, for she is standing on a root that secures me to this cliff. But I wonder if she has left anyway, if really there is someone else come to see my torture. Torture, as it is, should not be something viewed for pleasure. 

I wonder what she thinks of me, all wooden and dead in a different way than I ever could have dreamed. 

I wonder if she might reach out and put her hands around my waist, hold me in her cooling and calming embrace. I wonder if she might rub her salt off of my leaves and stay with me through the cold, cold night.

She turns and walks away along the cliffside. 

_

I spoke to her once. I felt brave. I had just refused the offer of a Goddess, and the sun was high and the sky blue. I sat along the edge of the sea, where her water brushes hands with my sand. I waited there, legs crossed and hands buried beneath the ground where I could cool them. I did not want to touch the water and infringe upon a self-made barrier. 

I did not touch the sea, she did not touch the sand. We only watched, waited for each other. Nothing more.

I sat like that for days, for we need not waste time on such trivial things as sleep and sustenance. We draw all we need from our land. 

There is an island, out on the edge of the horizon. It looks like a wooden plate placed on the table of the sea, upon which a forest has grown. I spent a good deal of time looking at it, learned what obscure features I could make out by heart.

She eventually surfaced. 

I had come to think of her as _my_ sea-nymph, individual and better than all of the others. She was sublime, in the light. A work of art even Daedalus would have envied. 

I beckoned her over, waving with a sand-crusted hand. She drifted in, slow as the tide.

She did not rise out of the water, but sat upon the seafloor with her slim legs crossed in the same manner as mine. It was the only time I saw all of her, the water clear as glass.

She looked at me. I looked back.

The lapping of the waves and the calling of Hera’s cuckoo were the only sounds that broke the silence. It stretched, I thought, beyond the shores of Thessaly, beyond Sparta and Athens and Troy and Egypt. The whole world felt to have drawn in a breath of anticipation for this tiny moment, teetering on the edge of exhalation.

I breathed out. Spoke. Said hello.

She replied in kind, with the low and sonorous sound of a voice unused for centuries. My woody, drawn-out voice could never hope to compare. She spoke like poetry, like the cry of the eagle that has taken up a nest in my trees or like the distant hum of mortal piety that sometimes reached our careful ears.

We exchanged formalities, first. She told me her name: Phaeno. _Shining_ She told me that she was an Oceanid, daughter among thousands. She is the nymph of mixing waters, as my calm river combines with her sea in little eddies and swirls of blue-and-brown colouration. 

I felt bad for bathing in that creek, naked and exposed, though I knew that I should not. It was as much my river as it was hers, then.

I told her of myself, of my small patch of wood and sand. I told her of the eagle that nests above, who mimicked her lovely voice.

We did not speak long. She was a sea-nymph, a daughter of Oceanos, after all. I was merely a minor wood-nymph, daughter of no one. Nothing would come of us fostering a friendship.

She retreated into the sea, and I returned up into my forest. 

We were solitary, meant to be so.

_

I feel the days come and go, Apollo’s chariot set and rise back up again. Time stretches on, scraped thin as paint over stone. In my prison of wood, I sit and wait.

I have always been one to wait, I think.

I stopped counting the days, months, years a long time ago. They mean nothing when I can only ascertain them by paying heed to him. I wish not to pay heed to him. 

I refine my sense. As a blind person does with their hearing and smell and taste, I do with my touch. It is all that is left with me, my touch and my thoughts. They are all I am, all I ever will be.

My roots are near sentient, able to pick up on anything as minute as the landing of a bird upon my ground. I feel the cliffs shrink, pulled down by gravity. I feel the sea rise, I feel her salt coat my leaves ever thicker. Clay upon already reinforced walls. 

How long will this last, I wonder? How long do I have before my cliff erodes and my roots snap under the tension, before I come to my death within Phaeno’s salty embrace? I suppose not long.

Centuries pass, time slipping like water between my fingers. I wished I had cared more when I could. To remember. I wish I knew how I came to be, how I was when I was young.

Always have I had the memory of a mortal, I think. 

Armies land upon my shores, docking their massive Persian ships in Phaeno’s waters, resting upon my roots and eating from my fruit trees. Dionysus held revels here for a reason, after all. Verdant forests yield healthy fruit. 

A thousand years pass, and I meet the Persians, Ottomans, the Byzantines, and the Greeks. My sands have become a good landing for their ever-evolving ships, now that Phaeno has brought her ocean up to greet my roots as I brought my cliff down to feel her cool hands upon my face once more.

I long ago learnt to tell their ships apart, the weight of the armour on their armies. The Ottomans have huge, heavy ships of metal and wood, crafted by some impossible hand. A ship made by Hephaestus, or some other metal-God. They have no armour, only tunics. The Byzantines have smaller ships of wood. Their armour is stronger but their ships do not seem god-made. I fear these will burn me. They walk with a certain foulness, not ordered as the Ottomans or the Greeks. 

None of it matters, really. I cannot burn. Nymphs are immortal, after all. We go on and go on, and never cease. I wish I could only cease.

They do not burn me. I almost hoped they would.

I am old now, and tired. I wish my story would come to an end, that I might slip into the sea and never look back.

After millennia have passed, after my ground has become trampled and my cliffs swallowed by the sea, they come again.

They start cutting down my trees, after a while. They do so to lay down roads and strange, evolved, god-like homes upon my roots. I do not really mind. Perhaps once they have destroyed my land, I will finally dissolve into the peace I have long wished for.

One by one, they resurrect their structures. Children run over my roots now, tripping and falling and scraping their chins. People run in strange chariots, four-wheeled and impossibly heavy, pulled by no man or horse.

They do not cut me down, though why I do not know. Perhaps Apollo has cursed me to be truly eternal, to persist even once I no longer can persist.

Sometimes, I wonder if the people who have come to live on my roots are Gods, but I do not know the Gods to inhabit the earth. I wonder if Phoebus Apollo even remembers me, if he feels any manner of remorse for what he did. I suppose he does not, for if Gods felt remorse they would be dead in days.

I wish they would fell me, that Zeus might send down his lightning to strike me off the earth. I wish Gaia herself would swallow me and pull me into her sleeping bosom.

They do not, and I persist. I continue and I continue and I do not cease. Why do I not cease?

I am no longer old. I am ancient, a survivor of all in this battered husk of a tree. My bark is worn down and cracked in places, smoothed by the climbing feet of a thousand children. My leaves are dull and floppy, still varnished in salt. I have grown, my trunk thickened and my branches expanded. I will always be small though, I think. Small, as I was when I was flesh rather than wood. 

I live on, and I persist.

I exist within the remnants of myself, the charred and beaten down wood that I have become.

I am tired and alone, worn and old.

I am nothing.

_

This is all they left me.


End file.
